Call for Papers:
The Black Jacobins Revisited
—Rewriting History
Dr. Rachel Douglas (University of Glasgow) announces a call for papers for the international conference titled The Black Jacobins Revisited: Rewriting History, to be held from October 27-28, 2013, at the International Slavery Museum and the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool, UK. The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2013.
Keynote speakers will include Professor Robert A. Hill (UCLA and C.L.R. James’s Literary Executor), Professor Nick Nesbitt (Princeton) and Dr. Matthew J. Smith (University of the West Indies). Further keynote speakers to be announced.
Description: To mark seventy-five years of pioneering anticolonial and historiography-shifting work, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, we are organising a major international two-day conference at the International Slavery Museum and Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool. Ever since The Black Jacobins transformed the way colonial history was written, this single work has for seventy-five years dominated all studies of the Haitian Revolution and decolonization. Yet, uncharted areas of this standard reference work still remain. Key aims of the conference are to break new ground and explore new approaches where this classic history is concerned.
Papers will be considered on any aspect relating to The Black Jacobins and its legacies, but possible topics could include: 1) Discussion of The Black Jacobins in relation to James’s own evolving political practice and activism, including his collaborations as political organizer; 2) the making and remaking of The Black Jacobins as the famous work morphs through major generic transformations, both beginning and ending life as a play; 3) contributions made by The Black Jacobins to problems of writing Caribbean history: gaps and perspectives in official historical records housed in metropolitan archives; 4) processes of rewriting history throughout the work’s evolution: revolutionizing previous historical interpretations of the Haitian Revolution, provincializing the French Revolution, engaging with processes of silencing and un-silencing stories of the Haitian Revolution, and of slavery-generated wealth in French and British cities; 5) James’s rethinking of key relationship between leaders and masses, the progressive refiguration of Haitian Revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, and foregrounding of alternative protagonists; 6) Caribbean identity as evolving theme of The Black Jacobins, and the related question of representation, e.g. James’s contributions to representations of slaves as principal actors of revolution in their own right; 7) progressive reframing and historicizing of the work through a range of prefaces, appendices, epilogues; 8) James’s evolving use of source materials and alternative historical models; 9) assessments of the work’s afterlives as founding text and key point of reference for all interpretations of the Haitian Revolution; issues of key editions, translation and mistranslation; and the work’s centrality to a range of political situations across Africa, the Caribbean and North America; and 9) links between The Black Jacobins and other key Marxist, Caribbean, African works, including those of James’s own wider corpus.
Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to Dr. Rachel Douglas, Rachel.Douglas@glasgow.ac.uk by 15 April, 2013.
Dr Rachel Douglas (Lecturer in French)
University of Glasgow, School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Room 313, Hetherington Building
Bute Gardens
Glasgow, G12 8RS
Tel: 0141 330 3660